SPOILER ALERT: The next piece accommodates spoilers from “My Controls,” the Season 2 finale of “The Rehearsal.” 

The distinction between “The Rehearsal” and prior Nathan Fielder works is that it’s explicitly about himself. The concept “Nathan for You” was actually about serving to small companies might have been a joke, however one the Comedy Central collection informed with a straight face. “The Rehearsal” began with the same idea, serving to volunteers navigate private relationships somewhat than skilled issues by way of obsessive preparation. However over the course of Season 1, Fielder — or somewhat, his stilted on-screen persona — went from making use of his strategies on others to utilizing them himself in a determined, doomed try to show the validity of his strategy. Which ought to have been a clue that your complete premise of Season 2 is an prolonged feint.

Ostensibly, the second version of “The Rehearsal” is Fielder’s honest try to make use of rehearsals as a way of enhancing communication amongst airline pilots, thus (he hopes) stopping lethal crashes. The trail to attaining this objective was already a digressive one, weaving collectively singing competitions, cloned canine and a bald-capped Fielder breastfeeding from an enormous puppet. (It made a sure sense within the second.) However Sunday’s finale started by revealing Fielder had been withholding a vital piece of data all through the prior episodes, one which reframes his whole endeavor. The whole time, Fielder was studying to fly a airplane himself, finally acquiring a industrial pilot’s license. In different phrases, Fielder isn’t aiding pilots; he is one. And by making an attempt to assist them, he’s actually making an attempt to assist himself. 

Fielder had begun to maneuver his personal arc into the foreground within the earlier episode, which addressed how his work has resonated with autistic followers who see themselves in his everlasting awkwardness. In idea, these armchair diagnoses had been an indirect means for Fielder to realize an viewers with Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee who’s each a member of the Home’s aviation subcommittee and an advocate for the neurodivergent. However additionally they lead Fielder to lastly flirt with a scientific rationalization for his continual incapability to attach simply with different individuals, the defining situation of his in-show character.

Within the brain-bending world of Fielder’s work, the place the road between actuality and efficiency is within the eye of the beholder, “The Rehearsal” breaking the fourth wall to include the response to Season 1 is essentially the most marginal of expansions. The autism storyline does, nonetheless, present Season 2 with what it beforehand lacked: a proof for why Fielder is so preoccupied with the captain-first officer relationship. The implication was already there — Fielder modeled one train to check pilots’ candor on his personal expertise producing “Canadian Idol” — however was now specific. Fielder sees aviation professionals’ issues talking freely as a model of his personal, so he makes them his personal by becoming a member of their brethren.

This venture opens up new comedian frontiers for “The Rehearsal”; Fielder slyly observes within the ultimate episode of the season that he’s uniquely unhealthy at touchdown the literal airplane. It additionally (pun as soon as once more supposed) elevates Fielder’s full-commitment stunts to new extremes. When a barely manic-sounding Fielder pitches a “loophole” in rules that enables him to co-pilot an precise jet as long as his passengers aren’t paying, it’s a wedding of “Nathan for You”-style scheming — keep in mind when he revived the smoking bar by staging a play? — with HBO assets. Even with out music to ratchet up the stress of an finally uneventful flight, the sight of Fielder within the cockpit at cruising altitude is jaw-dropping in a approach TV not often has the capability to be.

However there’s additionally a story logic at work right here. Fielder’s nagging considerations about his personal potential autism run headfirst into his airborne ambitions when he has to fill out an FAA disclosure kind. Towards Reddit’s recommendation, Fielder solicits a proper analysis, together with an fMRI, to make sure there’s nothing so off about him that he can’t be trusted with others’ lives. The outcomes aren’t prepared in time for his maiden voyage, which proceeds; as an alternative, he will get an ominous voicemail from the physician’s workplace whereas he lurks within the shadows, watching the ultimate efficiency of pseudo-reality present “Wings of Voice.” And in a coda with a staggering scale belied by its tossed-off supply, Fielder says he’s began shutting empty jets between distant corners of the world to deal with his insecurities. “They solely let the neatest and greatest individuals fly a airplane of this measurement,” his voiceover says over an aerial view of the African desert. “Nobody is allowed within the cockpit if there’s one thing flawed with them. So when you’re right here, you should be effective.”

These closing traces pack a punch, even when the season’s deliberately ambling construction meant they got here with much less lead-up that might improve their impression even additional. Fielder started Season 2 by framing his mission as an altruistic train, supposed to assist the individuals who drive and use air journey. (Judging by latest headlines, it looks like they want it.) The finale makes clear this retooled rehearsal apply, similar to the unique, is initially about Fielder — and never simply within the sense that Fielder, like everybody, has his points with saying what he feels. The truth is, it’s considered one of treasured few occasions “The Rehearsal” has hinted that the occasions of Season 1, together with a disastrous experiment in simulated parenthood, have weighed on the protagonist. What if Fielder is so disturbed by his personal dysfunction, and out of doors observers’ try to taxonomize it, that disproving their evaluation drives him to more and more over-the-top acts of one-upsmanship? May an irredeemable loner doomed to a life peering from the skin in do this?

Within the finale, Fielder appears each impressed and reassured to be taught that rehearsal is already an integral a part of pilots’ studying course of. Trainees go instantly from a high-tech simulator, just like the one Fielder visits outdoors Las Vegas, to ferrying passengers. He’s not alone in his dependency on obsessively detailed apply, nor his perception that these rituals actually do depart him ready for actual life. And ultimately, nothing issues besides the outcomes. When Fielder (efficiently) lands the airplane, he’s greeted by a cheering crowd of actors he’s labored with all through the season. “All this applause made me really feel like I had executed one thing vital,” he narrates. These individuals don’t learn about his inside turmoil, nor the pains he’s taken to beat it: “So long as you get everybody down safely, that’s all it takes to be a hero.”

By hiding his true efforts till the very finish, Fielder offers Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” a much less cohesive throughline, and maybe a extra blunted ultimate impression, than the present’s first run. But he additionally pulls off the form of magic trick that’s fascinated Fielder since he was an adolescent. (Fielder pinpoints his early makes an attempt at magicianhood as the primary time he realized his poor social abilities could possibly be an actual obstacle.) The tradeoff has its personal advantages, and comes with a fusion of kind and performance. Fielder has hid what he’s truly as much as — which, for all he professes to need extra emotional transparency, is what he concludes he truly must get via the day. For those who stick the touchdown, nobody cares how you probably did it.